The Forest

Shala knelt on the riverbank as she had on this day every year for the past two decades of her life. It was early morning, the sky was just beginning to illuminate the land. There were dew drops settled on the long blades of the grasses surrounding her. The trees on the far bank glistened like crystalline mantle pieces formed in the hands of giants and bathed in a fog of their breath. A small shrine stood unassuming between her and the lazy waters, no taller than her knee. It was a conglomeration of years of ceremonial grief. A cairn of stone, pain, momentoes, and candle wax marked the grave of her parent’s memory. A grave for the childhood she had never had.

She knelt in remembrance of her parents on the day her mother crossed the river following her father and never returned. In a fool’s errand to reunite daughter with father, her mother had left a small sleeping Shala with her grandmother and fled under the cover of dawn to cross the river. She never returned.

Every year was the same cycle of grief. Shala sat brooding in her anger at her mother. Her mother knew it wasn’t safe. She knew she would never return. And she still left. Maybe she had meant to never return. Shala shook her head in a pained effort to rid herself of the intrusive belief that she had been intentionally abandoned.

A stick broke in the wood in front of her and her gaze shot up to the forest’s edge. She found movement through the trees. There was never movement in the trees. There were a lot of names that her village had called it over the centuries. The haunted forest was in vogue this year. Maybe the forsaken grove the next. It always cycled, but the heart of it never changed.

All who enter here abandon all hope.

No one who entered the forest had ever returned. In the millennium of history that her village housed in their library there was only one unwavering rule. If you cross the river and enter the wood you will never come back. Every family tree had their numbers of missing. The curious, the heroic, the foolish, the desperate. In the early days of the colony, it was even used as a punishment. Exile to the wood. It seemed more forgiving than death with the same degree of finality. Eventually, public opinion stopped viewing it as the humanitarian option and that practice stopped. But still, every generation or so, whether it was a group or just one lost soul, people would cross the river for whatever their reasons, never to be seen again. The last foolish ones had included Shala’s father. The last heroic one was her mother. Though Shala felt she may have been a bit of a fool too, not that her grandmother would ever hear that about her beloved daughter.

The brush rustled and broke open across from Shala and out stumbled a woman in dated sleeveless robes torn and half-covered with mud. They locked eyes, Shala frozen with an unexpected litany of feelings she had no words for. They stared at each other for what seemed an eternity but was only a string of moments. Shala saw a familiarity in her face and posture. In her eyes, she saw the mother she knew from the few photos she had left behind. Around her mouth, she saw her grandmother, a perpetual scowl on her face. But she was younger than both of them. She might be ten years Shala’s senior at the most. She could have passed as her sister.

She stepped forward and her face shifted into a smile. She reached out as her foot touched the shallow water of the far bank, and her chest blossomed with a crimson flood. With each step, a new flow of blood appeared on her body. Slashes visible on her arms. Deep vermillion stains where her legs moved her wrap. She continued to smile, a softening relief in her eyes. She fell to her knees in the water, mirroring Shala on the far bank. The river halfway up her thigh. Her skin was wrinkled now, blood was dripping from her scalp. Both of her hands were out with palms up and pooling with blood flowing down her wrists. Her eyes went blank as she began to list to the side before a gust of wind shattered her into a cloud of dust and she blew into oblivion.

Shala collapsed onto her side. She stared blankly at the spot where the woman had been. There was no trace of her outside of the fading spark in her mind. She had come and gone in moments, but Shala knew she would be with her for the rest of her days, whether they were long or short. She lay there, shock locking her to the ground, hand mindlessly scratching at the damp riverbank, the sun cresting the horizon behind her and setting fire to the mist of the wood, and she knew that she was about to be a fool too.